“We are God when we are creating.… We are God when we are being,” Corita Kent said to an assembly of students in 1976, after admitting that “some days I believe in what I am going to say to you this afternoon, and some days I don’t.” Then 58 years old, the artist, activist, and ex-nun had certainly reckoned with her faith — at the time of that talk she was also in remission from ovarian cancer — but her core beliefs were unwavering and rooted in joy: Making is an act of hope, and creativity belongs to everyone. Her chief wish was for us to simply “give a damn.”

Even if you don’t know the name Corita Kent, you probably know her work. Kent created the iconic “Rainbow Swash” on the gas tank visible from I-93 in Dorchester. Its soaring strokes of pure color have uplifted the road-weary since 1971. By then, the artist had adopted Boston as her home on the heels of a personal revolution.

In 1967, Sister Corita, as she was then called, was the most famous nun in America. She was an art professor and printmaker whose contributions to Pop Art rivaled those of her fellow Angeleno Ed Ruscha. Her jubilant, gumball-bright serigraphs — fine art screen prints — had been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and commissioned by the Vatican for its World’s Fair pavilion. She appeared in two guises on Newsweek’s 1967 Christmas cover with the tagline “The Nun: Going Modern.” In one, in closeup, her face is framed by the cloth wimple of her formal habit. In the other, in street clothes, she smiles among some of her prints. One of those prints, “Jesus never fails,” is etched in a baby blue square, with one of the era’s most recognizable phrases — “I get by with a little help from my friends” — scrawled across a rectangle of lime green.
By fusing the sacred and the secular, Sister Corita — then head of the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood — opened a channel between the two. She encouraged the devout to listen for prayers in pop songs and to look for wonder in the bread aisle. A true free spirit, Kent made God, in the parlance of the day, groovy. To the outrage of some, she referred in one print to Mother Mary as “the juiciest tomato of all,” borrowing a Del Monte slogan. Under her direction, Immaculate Heart’s Mary’s Day celebration became a quasi-hippie gathering where the students wore crowns of flowers and carried signs reading “I Like God, God Likes Me.”
All of it seemed in keeping with Pope John XXIII’s efforts to modernize the Catholic Church under the Vatican II reforms. Yet it enraged conservative Los Angeles Archbishop James McIntyre, who repeatedly accused Sister Corita of blasphemy and disobedience.

McIntyre’s accusations against Sister Corita were part of his ongoing battle with the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which Corita had joined at the age of 18 in 1936. Led by Sister Anita Caspary, the order of nearly 400 nuns had been testing the waters of a freer lifestyle under Vatican II. McIntyre mandated that the nuns either return to traditional ways or seek dispensation from their vows. In response, 90 percent of the sisters left the order.

By 1970, the ecumenical Immaculate Heart Community had formed. By then, however, Sister Corita had left the order, Los Angeles, and the church.

Corita Kent, ex-nun, landed in Boston with a solid new community already in place. Since 1963, she had been represented by Celia Hubbard’s Botolph Gallery on Newbury Street. It was to Hubbard’s home on Cape Cod that Kent retreated in the summer of 1968. What had started as a sabbatical became a permanent move. Like other cities with large student populations, Boston in the late ’60s was a hub of the antiwar and civil rights movements, whose values aligned with the religious left’s. They saw in their Jesus a modern-day Prince of Peace and an advocate for social justice.

By then, Kent had already established her countercultural bona fides by helping to organize “An Evening With God” at the Boston Tea Party, a concert venue where bands like The Byrds and The Velvet Underground performed. Passing around store-bought bread as symbolic Communion, Kent was joined by the musician Judy Collins, the activist priest Daniel Berrigan, and the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, whose 1965 book “The Secular City” echoed Kent’s philosophy about God’s presence in the everyday.

Relocated to Hubbard’s Back Bay living room and adjusting to life outside the order, Kent entered a prolific and political period as an artist. During 1968 and ’69, she produced three distinct bodies of work: “international signal code alphabet,” “circus alphabet,” and “heroes & sheroes.” Kent incorporated new visual elements into each, using vintage advertising and wood block lettering.

“heroes & sheroes” was Kent’s response to the brutality and unrest of the time. A series of 29 prints combining bold black-and-white photography with Day-Glo inks, these works of stunning immediacy collaged images and headlines from the news with song lyrics, poetry, and philosophical quotes, paying tribute to leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King; John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy; Cesar Chavez; and antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. Kent’s grief and rage is palpable in heavy rubber-stamp letters spelling out “assassination,” “crucifixion,” and “Vietnam.” But so is hope in phrases like “Black is beautiful” and, from Leonard Cohen, “God is alive, magic is afoot.”

“It feels in some ways like everything just bubbles up out of her,” observes Nellie Scott, executive director of the Corita Art Center, which was founded in 1997 from Kent’s bequest, left upon her death in 1986, of an extensive archive and body of work to the Immaculate Heart Community. Kent may have left her sisters, but she never forgot them.

The Corita Art Center will be opening a new space in downtown Los Angeles on March 8, International Women’s Day. It will be inaugurated with a complete showing of “Heroes & Sheroes” alongside some of Kent’s source materials and correspondence. One exchange between Kent and her longtime collaborator and printer Harry Hambly has blunt references to soldiers and bombings. “It’s really remarkable to us how relevant [these works] are over 50 years later,” Scott says.

Indeed, even the Vatican now recognizes Kent’s prescience. In 2024, her work was exhibited in “With My Eyes,” a group show curated for the official Holy See pavilion at the Venice Biennale and mounted at the Giudecca Women’s Prison in Venice. The history between the church and Kent aside, Scott says, “when we learned that the show was inside of an active women’s prison and that it was really for the women, that felt very Corita to us.”

Kent’s pieces hung in the detention center’s cafeteria, with the 1965 print “Hope” above the doorway. Even the controversial “the juiciest tomato of them all” was part of the show, located just below “mary does laugh,” another of Kent’s takes on the Virgin Mother. Incorporating the logo of the supermarket chain Market Basket, the piece posits, Scott says, that if Mary were alive today, “she would smile and go grocery shopping and very much care about what was happening on earth that brought her son here.”

For the exhibition’s cocurators, Chiara Parisi, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and Bruno Racine, director of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Kent’s work represents “the transformative power of art to connect spirituality, social activism, and everyday life.”

Pope Francis even attended the exhibition and visited with the incarcerated women, who served as the show’s docents. Scott recalls a moving speech the pope gave about the artist in society. “He said that the artist’s role is to envision a city in which there are no strangers, and he cited the role of women artists in that: Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, and Corita Kent,” she says. “He did reference Corita directly. What a turn of events!”

Or, as Corita Kent might have put it, an everyday miracle.